Recent news from The Johns Hopkins University

This section contains regularly updated highlights of the news from around The Johns Hopkins
University. Links to the complete news reports from the nine schools,
the Applied Physics Laboratory and other centers and institutes are to
the left, as are links to help news media contact the Johns Hopkins
communications offices.

Three researchers including Carey Business School Assistant Professor Mario Macis say economic incentives can motivate members of the public to increase their donations of much-needed blood, the economists write in the May 24, 2013, issue of Science.

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University is hosting its 9th Annual Physics Fair from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 21, coinciding with the annual Spring Fair celebration on the Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St. in Baltimore. Events will take place in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy, located on the north end of the campus near Homewood Field.

The political beliefs of corporate CEOs strongly influence the tax-avoidance strategies of the firms they run, and those firms with Republican chief executive officers show a significantly higher level of tax avoidance than do companies with CEOs of no obvious political preference, according to a new study co-authored by a Johns Hopkins business professor.

Fifteen high school and middle school students from the Baltimore area will participate in a Computational Linguistics Workshop hosted by the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins.

A team of astronomers, including one at the Johns Hopkins University, has uncovered a burgeoning galactic metropolis, the most distant known in the early universe. This ancient collection of galaxies presumably grew into a modern galaxy cluster similar to the massive ones seen today. The developing cluster, named COSMOS-AzTEC3, was discovered and characterized by multi-wavelength telescopes, including NASA’s Spitzer, Chandra and Hubble space telescopes, and the ground-based W.M. Keck Observatory and Japan’s Subaru Telescope. Johannes Staguhn, associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Astrophysical Sciences in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, contributed data to uncover the nature of a main cluster member.

It’s commonly accepted that we appreciate something more if we have to work hard to get it, and a Johns Hopkins study bears that out, at least when it comes to food. The study — led by Johns Hopkins psychologist Alexander Johnson — seems to suggest that hard work can even enhance our appreciation for fare we might not favor, such as the low-fat, low calorie variety. At least in theory, this means that if we had to navigate an obstacle course to get to a plate of baby carrots, we might come to prefer those crunchy crudités over the sweet, gooey Snickers bars or Peanut M&Ms more easily accessible via the office vending machine. The study appeared this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy B.

Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Charles Bennett has spent his career studying the heavens, so it seems only fitting that he recently took his place among stars of another kind: those inducted into the University of Maryland Alumni Hall of Fame. Bennett, who recently shared the $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy for his groundbreaking work in determining the age, shape and composition of the universe, now shares this honor with 59 other distinguished University of Maryland luminaries, including Muppet creator Jim Henson, television writer and comedian Larry David, former NFL player Norman “Boomer” Esiason and American choreographer Liz Lerman. He was inducted into the University of Maryland Alumni Hall of Fame on June 5.

Since Johns Hopkins launched a revamped and incentive-laden program aimed at distributing $5 million to help employees buy homes in select Baltimore City communities, 108 employees have been awarded $635,500 in grants, and more are expected to apply as the weather warms and the home-buying season kicks into high gear.

A team led by Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Charles L. Bennett has won a $5 million National Science Foundation grant – administered through the stimulus act – to build an instrument designed to probe what happened during the universe’s first trillionth of a second, when it suddenly grew from submicroscopic to astronomical size in far less than time than it takes to blink your eye.